Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research

Some great resources

The Primary Health Care Research Information Service (PHCRIS) Fact Sheets

PHCRIS produces a variety of Fact Sheets on dissemination, information exchange and getting your point across. These Fact Sheets are available in PDF and are useful resources to share at workshops and conferences.

Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF)

"If research is the answer, what is the question? Key steps to turn decision-maker issues into research questions" - This question was the focus of the 2001 Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF) workshop. It concluded that the key to producing good research questions which meet decision makers’ needs is to create and maintain high-quality, ongoing interactions between research and management/policy partners.

The primary advice to decision makers was:1. Commit enough time.2. Get a knowledge broker on the team.3. Understand your research partner.4. Help your research partner understand you.5. Separate value choices from information needs.6. Unpackage the problem.

Useful Tools

A new low cost tool to recruit patients for research studies in general practice

Recruiting patients for research studies conducted in, or in association with, general practice is usually difficult, expensive and time consuming, and this can cause research studies to fail. Well-intentioned but busy GPs, practice nurses and practice staff who agree to help to recruit patients often forgot to approach patients who are potentially eligible for inclusion in research studies.

Professor Nigel Stocks and Dr Oliver Franks have worked with Dr Anton Knieriemen, who is a GP in Melbourne and the author of the Doctors’ Control Panel software, to develop a special purpose version called DCP.Recruit that partly automates the processes of identifying patients who are potentially eligible for a study and inviting them in to the study.

Here is a useful resource that helps you find and keeps track of all your publications both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed. You can also check who is citing your publications and it graphs citations over time.